After months of hard negotiation, Republicans killed the very bipartisan border bill they insisted on. So Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) pointed out that it’s unclear who could trust the GOP to negotiate now.
“GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said it was unclear who could trust the GOP to negotiate after they scuttled the bipartisan border bill.
She told me: ‘I’ve gone through the multiple stages of grief. Today I’m just pissed off,’” CNN’s Manu Raju reported on Wednesday. Murkowski added, “I have a difficult time understanding again how anyone else in the future is going to want to be on that negotiating team — on anything —- if we are going to be against it.”
The Alaskan Republican has a good point, especially as Republicans immediately pivoted to demanding a border bill, after killing the border bill they demanded. They wouldn’t do aid to Ukraine without the border, so Democrats spent months in good faith negotiations with them only to have Republicans walk away from a bill that gave them 80% of what they asked for, when they aren’t even the majority in the Senate.
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Conservatives are pushing Republicans to “just close the border and deport everyone,” without seeming to grasp that manning the border and deporting people cost money. The money President Biden has been requesting for over a year now, in anticipation of the expiration of Title 42.
It costs money to deal with the border. Republicans have refused the requested funding for a year, and now they have publicly retreated from the border in a very public way that leaves them vulnerable in the 2024 election.
As Trump runs on how bad the border is, Democrats will blast Republicans standing down from the border in an epic self-own humiliation that really cannot be overstated.
It’s unclear how or why it’s taken this long for Murkowski to realize just what her party has become under Trump, but she has been a good faith lawmaker who votes her convictions and represents her constituents well. The anger she is feeling is understandable, as her beliefs have been knifed in the back to benefit Donald Trump, who is not even in office and in the last election, was rejected by the voters.
impeachable offense, and House Republicans don’t have a leg to stand on.
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